Afternoons With the Blinds Drawn Page 16

  Back towards the tail-end of the Coming Up campaign we had written ‘He’s Gone’. It was a beautiful, graceful thing which borrowed the feel of one of those old torch-song standards like ‘My Way’ and charted the slow disintegration of my and Sam’s relationship. We had bumbled around under the plane trees and on the scruffier pavements of west London for many years, her candid wit and her unaffected honesty acting as a counterbalance to my frothy quixotry and providing a dynamic that held us together and provided the emotional back-drop to some wonderful times. Locked together though we had slid into a mutual pit of addiction which of course in many ways created a further level of unhealthy co-dependency and we found ourselves drifting within a strange limbo, our emotions deadened through substance abuse but our ability to instigate change impeded. Even though I wasn’t able to express it at the time I think that I began to feel guilty for dragging her into this hell with me. I felt I had been terribly glib and irresponsible as I convinced myself that it was all still some twisted extension of my work, that I was still somehow playing at what I was doing, but for her the consequences seemed much less superficial and far more real as she became increasingly damaged by the testing, harrowing journey. In ‘He’s Gone’ I used the same device as for ‘My Insatiable One’ years earlier where I switched perspectives and talked about myself in the third person to weave together a grief-laden tale of loss and sadness that still moves me. Over a decade later I would sing it at the Albert Hall during our come-back show as a dedication to my friend Jesse who tragically had just killed himself, the words and the tone seeming somehow equally as relevant and the fact that Jesse was my and Sam’s beautiful, much missed mutual friend seeming to justify the act. Back when recording the song, Steve Osborne had taken its fairly trad nature and modernised it with delays and keyboards and made it one of the outstanding moments on the album and one of the handful of tracks of which I am still very proud.

  As we scrabbled around trying to finish the album it was again put to us by Saul that we were still missing the first single. ‘She’s In Fashion’ although bristling with cross-over chart pizzazz seemed too breezy and light to be the opening statement from a band known for releasing singles with grit and drama and so, keen not to confuse the fan-base, Richard and Neil and myself busied ourselves with the often dutiful process that is ‘writing a single’, something that if done wrong can feel forced and formulaic, a dull litany of checklists and empty musical gestures … which is how we came up with the anthem to meaninglessness that was ‘Electricity’, an uninspired box-ticker with a ‘big’ chorus and a ‘gutsy’ verse, a waste of four minutes and thirty-nine seconds of everyone’s time that could almost have been created by one of the novel-writing machines that Julia operated in 1984. This shouty, pointless, hollow song signifying absolutely nothing when released of course, like its equally vacuous cousin ‘Stay Together’, crashed into the top five and enjoyed saturation levels of mainstream exposure while genuine gems like ‘The Wild Ones’ and ‘Everything Will Flow’ floundered and flopped on the margins. Ah well, such is life. I think my biggest criticism of our work during this period though would have to rest on my lyric writing. My unforgivable lack of focus and drift into selfishness had blunted my previously sharp powers of observation and initiated a slow slide into self-parody. I think the general laziness of the lyrics to this album were responsible for a hugely resonating dissection of my style of writing where critics started to correctly see that I was regurgitating ideas to such an extent that it felt that all one needed for a Suede song was to mention a few stock phrases like ‘nuclear skies’ and ‘hired cars’ and ‘pigs by motorways’ or something and you could make a fairly decent fist of your own version. I justified it at the time as a shift away from focusing on the words towards the music in a vague chase for some sort of modernity but of course it was never going to be interpreted like that. It’s a legacy that I still find myself wrestling with and one born from my indolent approach on that record. I think previously I had just tip-toed the right side of the line, keen to develop a specific lexicon and tone that would create a Suede landscape but as my mind became dulled by addiction and cravings I allowed it to be overused and what was previously a strong lyrical identity became a tired, clichéd reliance on reusable ideas lending the whole album a patina of uninspired vacuity, which had huge, unexpected consequences going forward into the next album and is something which I deeply, deeply regret.

  There were some pertinent moments of truth of course, like the searingly bleak documenting of the sad state of my life called ‘Down’. It was something that I had written myself on a baby grand piano that I had bought from one of the antique shops on Golborne Road. I had put it in the dusty, disused spare room that looked out on to the old red-brick wall which hid the clattering train lines. Beyond that the Westway rumbled and soughed and the tower blocks of the Harrow Road estates loomed against the back-lit skies with a monolithic, science-fiction grace. It was a conventional ballad which Neil later suggested we lend the feel of ‘Mother’ by John Lennon but when I plonked out the first few chords one cheerless twilit afternoon it had more of a leaden, ploddy sound which echoed the tragedy of the lyric. It was a grim self-portrait, a dark vision of myself as a spent, weakened man. ‘Hey you chase the day away / Hey you draw the blinds and blow your mind away’ went the chorus: a sad, honest snap-shot of the desperate truth of my life. This painfully candid self-reflection came in the aftermath of a truly horrific episode which acted eventually as a pivotal watershed in my life. The evening in question was the tail-end of a smear of days in which Alan, Sam and myself had taken our levels of consumption to new uncharted territories. Trembling and shaking and gurning we had pushed ourselves way beyond what was usually acceptable, even for us. At one point Sam staggered upstairs to use the bathroom when suddenly Alan and I heard a heavy thump echoing through the ceiling followed by a series of strange knocking sounds. Sensing something was terribly wrong we sprinted upstairs to find Sam convulsing on the floorboards in the throes of a horrific fit, her mouth frothing with white foam and spittle and her eyes rolling back and fluttering in furious, terrifying spasms. As horror and blind white-knuckled panic gripped me I somehow found an instinct deep within myself and proceeded to pump her heart with the heel of my palms and breathe heavily into her mouth with mine until with a gasping, shuddering breath she came back to us. For one unbelievably harrowing moment all of our lives were hanging suspended by a gossamer thread and we had glimpsed something that was so dark as to really defy description. I will never forget it and the consequences of what might have happened that night still torment me to this day and sometimes still spool within my mind’s eye in a horrific, circling loop.

  WE DON’T HAVE TO

  LIVE LIKE THIS

  Dragging the agenda back to the dreary machinery of the music business seems so trivial and petty after reliving that awful, awful moment but despite the horrors and the looming spectre of tragedy, despite the ragged, faltering journey, despite the flaws in the record and the disjointed, joyless way in which it was made, despite the huge unanswered questions dangling threateningly over the band we had somehow, somehow managed to complete it and deliver something which everyone pretended they were happy with. When faced with promoting an album there is a point at which the whole team – band, record company, management, publishers, press people and promoters – are all forced to get behind it. The period of reflection and questioning ends and it becomes part of everyone’s jobs to convince themselves and everyone around them that they love the product they are expected to work with and to spread enthusiasm in order to try to inspire industry confidence, hence the proliferation of meaningless, platitudinous phrases like ‘it’s the best thing they’ve ever done’ or ‘it’s a massive return to form’ being uttered every time certain bands put out a new record. It’s part of the dull, uninspiring mechanics of releasing records as, with some notable exceptions, they are often released by dull, uninspired people who are unable to express themsel
ves in language beyond cliché, and indeed in some ways the industry requires this lack of imagination. Despite the seismic changes imposed on it by the digital revolution it’s still a heavy, lumbering beast that finds it hard to take on new ideas but that steady inevitability is how it ambles ever forward. I had decided to call the album Head Music, enjoying its oblique, modern tone which suggested to me the cleaner lines of the sort of music we were trying to make. I think to be honest it may have been a phrase that I had heard Justine use once when describing something and magpie-like I had grabbed it and scribbled it down in the cramped forest of phrases in my notebook.

  There is also always a bit of a delay in how the industry and the press and the public receive records which means that you are often either trying to atone for the mistakes of the previous one or bathing in its success. As Head Music had followed what was commercially our most successful record yet there was a definite tide of ebullience that greeted its release and we were offered headline festival slots and saturation press coverage and record shop prioritisation like never before as we embarked on the nascent steps of the campaign. We had reached the stage where the fizz and clamour around the release had given us the reach to be able to conduct a series of press conferences rather than scraps of bitty interviews to separate papers and so we sat there on a podium on a few occasions like prize turnips hiding behind our sunglasses and laughing at the surreal perversity of the whole thing as the shutters clicked and a small thicket of jostling microphones awaited our utterances. Emerging from the stifling maze of self-doubt and struggle that is inherent in making any album is always actually quite an exciting time; there’s a period of a month or so between delivering the record and it meeting the cold, hard edges of the real world when you always genuinely think you have made something special, something that might just potentially connect in a way that you have never connected before and you are filled with a temporary short-lived effervescence, a willing self-deception partly built around hope but also because promoting it is impossible unless you genuinely believe in it – you have to ignore its flaws in order that you can get on with your job. And so I allowed myself to be sucked into that shallow fantasy, believing the promises of dizzying projected sales figures and untold success that the industry was murmuring in my ear like a coquettish lover whispering sweet nothings, but it was all just a brittle illusion, a house of cards that began to tumble and fall around us once everything had inevitably flattened and lost its fizz. The small string of anarchic fan-club shows that had kicked off the campaign would have been exciting even if we hadn’t turned up as the level of anticipation was so feverish by that point that my shortcomings as a performer due to physical weakness and addiction were not fully exposed. In truth I was only half there and operated on auto-pilot, never fully able to give myself to the bacchanalian parade of borrowed insanity that you need to surrender yourself to in order to put on a great show. As Turner says in Nic Roeg’s famous film: ‘The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way is the one that achieves madness’. When we started to tour properly however we encountered real problems. After a while it became clear that Neil was simply too unwell to continue with us on the road. Despite our hopes to the contrary, his crippling illness still meant that he was spending vast swathes of time bed-bound and his doctors had advised that the sapping, wearying process of touring was the last thing that their patient needed. It must have been a terrible time for him but it was a hard time for me too as despite feeling guilty about it and understanding the reasons I couldn’t help feeling let down and not knowing how to express my frustrations they would often bubble over as anger. Unable to return to being a four-piece as so much of the set now required keyboards we drafted in Alex Lee whom we had met when Strangelove toured with us back in 1995. They had been a fantastic support band, one of those whose dramatic, emotional songs come alive on stage. Their singer Patrick Duff was a brilliant performer – confrontational and utterly engaging – and between sound checks and during tour dead-time he had revealed himself as a surprisingly warm and lovely man and one with whom I am glad to say I am still friends today. Alex was always the musical rock to Patrick’s erratic intensity; a fine guitar player and super-talented all-round musician he flew out to the show at very short notice and with a scant amount of rehearsal proceeded to deal with the overwhelming task with an air of bewildering calm, steadying our ship as we bobbed about on those choppy, churning seas. And so we limped on but this time I had a sickening feeling that our wounds might be mortal. Neil joining the band had given us a balance and a chemistry and his musical influence was a key element in the kind of record that Head Music had become; in many ways I felt as though we had almost built it around him and suddenly to find an empty space where he once was seemed to somehow mock the album’s integrity and undermine the whole campaign with a fatal fault-line. It was to become another bullet in the gun that would eventually kill us.

  PART FIVE

  I DROWN IN THE DRUMMING

  PLOUGHLAND

  As I gazed out over the quiet lawn and beyond the thicket of birch trees that screened the house from the road I sipped at my tea and rewound the cassette tape. The traffic soughed gently along the High Road outside that backed on to the hedged borders of the garden with the occasional whoosh and rumble which scattered the blossom of late spring and softly punctuated the rhythm of the day; a strange reminder of the existence of other human life, no matter how dislocated, no matter how removed. I had rented what I suppose would be called a ‘granny flat’, a small annexed self-contained house that I was using as a temporary writing retreat in a place called Chipstead, a sleepy little Surrey village full of gruff golf-playing traders and their bored pony-riding wives nestled in the heart of the stockbroker belt. It was a move designed to supply as much isolation and as much distance as possible from the temptations and frenetic pulse of the city, providing me with space and calm and somewhere I could gather my thoughts and begin work on what would become our last album together. Well, at least until the next life. Still not having passed my test, once my driver John had dropped me off I was stranded within the countryside’s leafy clutches, willingly exiled to a strange lonely Arcadian world of drifting bucolic solitude and solemn pastoral reflection. Between long bouts hammering away at my manual typewriter and squawking into my microphone I would clear my cluttered, deafened head by putting on my scruffy old Vans trainers and tramping along the bramble-lined pathways, losing myself in long afternoons of quiet meditation that only a spot of bracing wandering can provide. I was trying to escape from the gloomy litter-strewn rooms and the paranoia and the shimmer of threat that had become life in the city and especially from the abject horrors that had defined the genesis of Head Music, realising a little too late that what I was throwing away as I glibly shook out the contents of the binbags was actually my life. What I found however as I traipsed along the muddy paths and under the knotted branches of the horse-chestnut trees was a different kind of truth from the one I was expecting. The countryside, I was slowly rediscovering, rather than being some idealised idyll, some pleasant, inoffensive John Constable painting brought to life, was actually rife with the same kind of tawdry secrets as the city and I would often happen upon torn, muddied pages of porn magazines stashed secretly under bushes or the telltale litter of used drug paraphernalia, stark reminders that people will seek out the stink of life no matter where they are. Sometimes while ambling through a Disneyesque wooded glade I would be confronted with sour graveyards of rusted white enamel fridges and sodden ripped furniture and broken children’s car seats: shameful, discarded, fly-tipped hoards sat stark and surreal against the quiet, sober beauty of nature. Slowly I began to sketch out a very rough idea for an album set in a strange rural hinterland circumscribed by B roads, a world of roadkill and overgrown concrete paths and rotting animals – a kind of dark, Ted Hughes-tinged vision that portrayed the countryside as a real place rather than some romanticised Claude Lorrain watercolour. I had become slightl
y obsessed with Ballard’s brilliantly dystopian Concrete Island, an updated version of Robinson Crusoe in which a man finds himself marooned within an enclosure, hemmed in by motorways and crash barriers and forced to live in an unseen, liminal world of waist-high grass and rusted, broken car parts. The imagery of the story began to resonate powerfully with me as I tramped around the green belt and always stayed in my mind. Even though the clarity of the idea might eventually become diluted it would be revisited nearly twenty years later with The Blue Hour. I wonder what it is about authors like Ballard and Orwell that inspires so many musicians. For me there is something both profound and stylish about their writing and about the worlds that they create, an alluring blend of depth and surface. Both ruthlessly dissect the carcass of the human condition but do so within a charged and highly stylised arena. 1984, for all its contemporary relevance, is a simple love story spotlit against a mannered back-drop and Ballard’s neo-Futurist imagery always seems to me to be so rich with theatre that you can almost see the stage sets. I suppose it’s this palpable drama that musicians respond to, channelling it into those simplistic brushstrokes that make up most rock songs.